He moved gingerly into the deep water again, and at last swam out to investigate. He could see two or three dark round surfaces letting the tide sway them easily away from shore. At his approach they neither dived nor turned to attack him. "They mighty tame," said Bascom, laying his hand on one. "They—they's watermelons!"
"Where did you come from?" he asked, taking the nearest in his arms. "What po' dumb idiot let you get away like this? Did you ax permission to come here visitin' me? I'm mighty glad to see you, anyways. You's jus' who I was a-thinkin' of."
He capered round them for a while, then gathered them all in a line within his arm. They were too many for him, but the wrestle to keep them from bobbing over or under and getting away was sheer delight. "Three melons!" he repeated; "cooled in this high tide! Three of 'em! What'll Captain Tony say?"
He was so interested in thinking of Captain Tony's surprise that the outside melon escaped from him, and he could not get it again without losing the other two.
"I'll come back for you," he promised; "you can't go far 'thouten your fins grow." He took the other two and put them under a clump of palmettoes, where they would make no new acquaintances while he was gone. "Don't know as anybody else is up," he said; "but they might be. It was a terrible hot night."
As he waded out again over the sharp oyster-shells the sky had grown blue instead of gray, and a brightness sprang across the water, touching hundreds and hundreds of glistening green watermelons undulating with the falling tide.
Bascom's heart stood still. He stopped right where he was, and his brown face grew tense with round-eyed wonder. The water lapped against his breast. He almost let it take him off his feet. "I knowed they was called watermelons," he said, slowly, "but I never caught 'em growing in the water by night before. How's we goin' to get 'em in.'"
He looked from the melons toward the shore, where Captain Tony's long seine hung on the poles beside the submerged pier. "Usses can haul 'em in," he said.
Although it was exceedingly early there was no time to lose. It would take two good hours to get the melons in, and the people on the bay would be only too glad to help in the rescuing as soon as they woke up. "Folkses is always so interested in what I find," Bascom grumbled; but for once no one troubled him. He roused Captain Tony, and they hitched the net between two boats and, rowing apart, circled around the melons with it, gathering them in, until they were fairly rafting them before it toward the shore. The net bulged in a great crescent, and Bascom could hardly keep his boat abreast of the Captain's. The weight they were towing made it seem as if his oars were pulling through stiff clay. No net on all the coast had ever had such a full haul before. Bascom and the Captain exulted in it, even while their faces grew scarlet.
"We can'd take in anoder one," the Captain declared; "de net can'd stan' de strain." And closing together as much as the mass between them would permit, they pulled ashore and rolled the melons out in a line upon the beach. The tide was going out so fast that each haul made a separate rank farther and farther out from the high drift-mark in the grass.